Archive for March 2003

Happy Birthday to my old friend Chris Brown, who I haven’t seen for over 21 years, and have lost all contact with.

This isn’t meant to be a dream diary of course. However, last night was another brain-flickingly vile message from the subconscious that my quiet night had come about a week late.

I think I had been booked by Daisy Lees (somehow it was all her fault) to do a gig in this huge leisure complex situated in the middle of some particularly sinister woodland. Actually it was kind of like woodland cum jungle. There was a sense of decay anyway, like dry rot or something. It’s all very sketchy â€“ this dream doesn’t really hang together very well. The key thing is that this entertainment complex and the surrounding environment are permeated by an extremely strong sense of threat from some force of utter evil, and I, in my sleep, am shitting it. I think I’m trying to get to the concert area to do the gig, or maybe I’m just trying to escape the unnamed awfulness, but I keep ending up in restaurants. I believe I’m with Sam, actually. These restaurants are unbelievably modern and high-tech, but in a really corporate way, like Little Chef might look like in 2038 or something. The escalators don’t even seem to have places to put your feet, for instance, but they function well enough. At one point we sit down next to a group of ten or fifteen young corporate drones and their team leader, who must be on some sort of training jolly. Sam and I order “reggae food”, which doesn’t arrive, or doesn’t arrive on time anyway (we are forced to tell the waiter “we ordered the reggae food…?”). Suddenly the group next to us are called away by some unknown signal. Before they leave they begin to fight over the team leader’s remaining food “I’m having Martin’s bacon!” yelps one, picking it up with his fingers and dropping it into his mouth from above. Now that I think about it, I’m sure the team leader is my old New Deal supervisor, an outrageously neat and normal man called Martin Parker. The rest of the dream is the really scary bit and takes place in the stairwells that cling to this confusing modern edifice of fear. Funnily enough they aren’t in the least modern or shiny at all, and in fact are of 60’s design and very grimy. In fact they’re kind of like rundown greenhouses, surrounded by the aforementioned nasty forest, which is clearly visible through the glass. Suddenly we see a madman running around outside! He is grey-haired and wild! Then the automatic doors open and we see him trying to circumnavigate the building in order to gain entry! We step off the floor sensors and the doors shut just in time! This keeps happening! Then I begin to wonder whether the man is mad at all. Maybe he is just trying to escape the evil too. Then I see a terrifying Russian businessman with an enormous swollen head (maybe four times normal, he looks barely human) reclining on the floor of the stairwell. Unbound by gravity’s pull, I begin to float above him, intending to kick his swollen face as hard as I can, but then he starts to speak. He tells us that he has come face to face with the horror from which we are all fleeing, and he leaves us in no doubt that it is indeed an unspeakable evil, because he is literally sick with fear. He says it is “up there”.

At this point I wake up and see that it is only 1:15AM, and I’m actually really genuinely fearful of the fact that I have most of the remainder of the night to get through. Eventually I drift off again and have regular stupid dreams, waking once each hour until I get up at 7:30.

Hang on! I’ve just remembered a bit of the dream! I knew I wasn’t doing a gig. In fact, Daisy has asked me to take a role in a play “…which might be performed by a group of blacks (I know, but I recall thinking that this was unintentionally offensive, or easily misinterpreted) in between three and five hours.” I remember thinking that, what with all the evil about, this was just too damn long. I was to play the part of a character called Kam.